The Sega Dreamcast homebrew community has been going from strength to strength in recent years, and it now looks like the Nintendo GameCube community could soon be joining it.
That's because the systems engineer and Dreamcast/GameCube enthusiast Eric Fradella has now successfully ported the Dreamcast homebrew software development kit, KallistiOS, to the Nintendo platform.
This is the SDK behind the recent Dreamcast ports of Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, Star Fox 64, and Super Mario 64.
What this essentially means, according to Fradella and his collaborator Falco Girgis, is that developers will soon be able to "easily port [Dreamcast] software over" and"share code between the Dreamcast and Gamecube", making it possible to target both platforms with significantly less effort.
Fradella announced the news on social media over the weekend, stating that they had also ported other homebrew tools, including GLdc (the Dreamcast's OpenGL implementation) and SH4ZAM (the Sega Dreamcast SH4 fast math library), the latter of which required Girgis's help.
In order to demonstrate the possibilities of the Nintendo Gamecube "joining the KallistiOS ecosystem", Fradella put together what he calls a "rough port" of Super Mario 64 to the Nintendo GameCube, which he says still requires "some love and polish" but impressively states "barely took an afternoon" of work to get up and running.
The footage shared shows Mario running around Peach's castle and other memorable locations, including Bob-Omb Battlefield, Cool Cool Mountain, Dire Dire Docks, and Whomp's Fortress, with some visual glitches still present.
These would obviously need to be ironed out if this were to become a proper port, but considering this likely took only a few hours in total, it is incredibly impressive work.